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Premiere website builder Made With Color and Beautiful/Decay team up each week to bring you some of the best contemporary artists and designers using Made With Color to build their sleek websites. Website builder Made With Color helps artists create well-designed and mobile/tablet responsive websites in a few minutes without having to touch a line of code.This week we are pleased to present the work of Mark Francis Williams.

The powerful black and white monoprints of Romanian artist Mark Francis Williams look like eroding ghost-like portraits of ancestors who passed many decades ago. In a constant flux between abstraction and representation, the haunting figures appear and disappear over and over again like a distant memory that you can’t quite put together but also can’t forget.

About his work Williams states:

My work explores states of impermanence and the resulting aesthetic. It is a response to the experience of living in Bucharest – a city of disparities and contrasts.

Across this city, I am unnerved by the pugnaciously glossy, newly erected shopping malls rising phoenix like, offering a hyper-real, super-beautiful sense of order that conveys certainty, purpose and fixedness. It is a vacuous grandeur that leaves no space for error. The unintentional consequence of such artificial splendor is to highlight the true soul and charm of the city. One where buildings crumble, facades crack and deterioration is pervasive. Due to Bucharest’s close location to a major earthquake fault line a further sense of impending ruin permeates. Red warning dots on exteriors signify the approaching collapse of unstable buildings.

It is in this opposing fragile state that I find the city at its most authentic and most alluring. The environmental decline presents a natural orderliness, a passing self-organisation that quietly exhibits the inevitability of the life cycle. These are the qualities that I value and connect with and the platform I use as a investigative focus for my work.

Rather than recreate, emulate or photograph eroding materials, I choose to use faces and figures as a story telling vehicle. The human portrait is accessible and connects immediately with a viewer. It is a device I use to examine the correlation between man and his habitat, between changes in state and concepts of beauty.

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As with everything else in life technology is changing the way fashion is created, documented, and finally consumed. Long gone are the days of discovering small brands by accident while on vacation or stopping someone on the street to ask them what designer they are wearing. In todays world everyone has immediate access to everything and small fashion brands, stylists, and writers only need a few minutes to create a website or youtube channel and share their vision with the world.

In this short film “Future of Fashion” i-D explores the way in which the internet and technology is transforming the industry. Supermodel Coco Rocha recounts her experiences of multimedia catwalk performances while Net-A-Porter’s Natalie Massenet talks e-commerce; i-D’s New York Fashion Director Alastair McKimm explores 3D printing, fashion designers threeASFOUR predict the future of wearable tech, and internet wizards OKFocus explain how computers can revolutionize fashion as much as photography has. Join these fashion luminaries as they share stories of fashions yesteryear and discuss how technology will influence fashion in the future.

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Photographer Henry Hargreaves and food stylist Caitlin Levin have joined forces to bring you the tastiest architectural photo series on earth! Focusing on iconic museums and institutions from around the world the duo has painstakingly recreated every little detail out of licorice, gummy bears, chocolates, bubblegum and of course gingerbread! Museums such as the Guggenheim in New York City and the Louvre in Paris are transformed into tasty morsels of architecture by Levin and then dramatically shot by Hargreaves. The result is a delicious treat that will satisfy your artsy academic side as well as your belly!

Hargreaves and Levin will be exhibiting this series during Miami Basel at Dylan’s Candy Bar. Go see them in person and have some candy for us! (via design boom)

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Premiere website builder Made With Color and Beautiful/Decay have teamed up yet again to bring you exclusive artist features. Each week we bring you some of the most exciting artists and designers working today who use Made With Color to create their clean and sleek websites. Website builder Made With Color doesn’t just help artists create minimal and mobile/tablet responsive websites but allows them to do so in a few minutes without having to touch a line of code.This week we are happy to share the work hilarious and offbeat illustrations of Kyle Stewart.

Canadian illustrator Kyle stewart is currently working on his Illustration degree at Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD). When Stewart isn’t busy hitting the books at OCAD he is churning out his pop culture laced mixed media illustrations, in watercolor, collage, and number two pencil. Influenced by everything from 80’s and 90’s sitcoms (Alf!) and action movies (Robocop!) to his early years of skateboarding, Stewart’s strong sense of line and bold color comes through in all his works making us laugh with him at his subtle alterations to the pop icons that we all know and love.

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To celebrate this day of giving thanks our good friends at Made With Color want to offer Beautiful/Decay readers a special holiday deal in honor of the great updates they just launched.

Made With Color has a host of new designs to make your site look sleek and professional and they have just launched three new stylish layouts: Corbusier Ocean, Wright Noir, and Wright Paynes. If that weren’t sweet enough, now you can choose their new square thumbnail gallery for showcasing your work.

As always their portfolio sites are responsive and optimized for viewing on a desktop, tablet and smart phone, so your work looks great where ever you view it.

To celebrate Thanksgiving we want to share a little extra cheer with everyone by offering a 29% discount to all new users for their first year of service with Made With Color! Simply sign up and use discount code “thankful29” in the “My Account” section of the site and enter your credit card info to let the savings roll in! This discount code is valid through December 3rd so make sure to enter your credit card and discount code in before then to redeem the 29% discount!

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Beautiful/Decay has partnered with premiere artist portfolio building platform Made With Color to bring you some of the most exciting contemporary artists working today. Made With Color allows you to create a website that is professional and easy to use with just a few clicks and no coding. If that’s not enough all Made With Color sites are optimized for mobile and tablet viewing so you’re site looks perfect no matter how it’s being viewed. This week we are happy bring you the work of Portland based artist and Made With Color user Wendy Red Star.

Over the course of her practice, Wendy Red Star has worked within and between the mediums of photography, sculpture, installation, performance and design. Red Star’s multilayered work influences are drawn from her tribal background (Crow Nation), daily surroundings, aesthetic experiences, collected snapshots of moments of the past and present, and stories that are both real and imagined. Through her photographs and sculpture a new cosmos is built, simultaneously urban-rural and high-low, conveying ideas through representations created from suggested associations of seemingly diverse sites, objects and ideas. HUD houses, rez cars, three legged dogs, powwow culture, indigenous commoditization, and Red Star’s personal collection of memories growing up as a half-breed on the Crow Indian reservation are used to excite a response in a form that can be experienced by others.

The work represents an insider/outsider view that is rich with complexity and contradiction. Red Star’s unruly approach examines the consumptive exposure of a cross section of American cultures while also being a meditation on her own identity. Her works explore the intersection between life on the reservation and the world outside of that environment. Red Star thinks of herself as a cultural archivist speaking sincerely about the experience of being a Crow Indian in contemporary society.

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Olaf Breuning‘s The Art Freaks, is a group of color photographs transposing the signature styles of seminal 20th-century artists into prosaic body painting. If the manners in which Breuning’s subjects have been painted are not immediately identifiable, then titles like Andy, Frieda, and Piet confirm their references. Stemming from the artist’s recent investigation into his idiosyncratic relationship with modern and contemporary art, the larger than life-sized prints of elaborately painted bodies, which comprise The Art Freaks, conflate the tropes of so-called high and low artistic techniques as they discuss notions of kitsch, cliché, and reproduction.

As Breuning humorously attempts to imitate Takashi Murakami’s character Kiki (Takashi [2011]) or the mounting release of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) in Edvard (2011), he also mimics street performers who paint their bodies to transform into unique characters for the amusement, and pocket money, of passers-by; a tantamount treatment of craft, medium, and cultural signifiers that pervades Breuning’s multifarious oeuvre. Whether through his drawings, sculptures, or well-known website, the specific brand of pastiche Breuning employs in his work is a decidedly indiscriminate one that draws on everything from the Easter Bunny to Andy Warhol’s Marilyns.

Both humorous and uncanny, The Art Freaks not only questions our relationship to the enduring artworks Breuning choses to reference in his series, but also to the reproductions and consumable patina through which most of us experience these artists’ works and their distinctive aesthetics. (via davids sketchbook)

If you want to see more work by Olaf Breuning we recommend Beautiful/Decay Magazine Issue: Y which includes a very nice feature on the artist.

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Dutch designer Yoni Lefevre’s series Grey Power has the simple aim of honoring our old and wise grandparents in a quirky, fun, and imaginative way. Using children drawings of their grandparents Lefevre transforms the hilariously bizarre drawings into charming and playful photographs that depicts grandparents as active and fun heros.

About the project Lefevre states:

“We are living in a rapidly ageing society. A majority regards this as a negative development. Older people are perceived as standing on the sideline, having lost their independence. But I see the great value this generation can offer. For ‘Grey Power’ I used drawings made by children of their grandparents, to create an image boost for this generation. Children do not regard their grandparents as grey and withered, but as active human beings who add color to their lives. Their fresh perspective can contribute towards a more nuanced and positive view on the composition of our society.”

We at Beautiful/Decay abosolutely love this project as it is proof that sometimes a simple concept can pack a powerful (and hilarious) punch. (via designboom)